Integration of detailed household and housing unit characteristic data with critical infrastructure for post-hazard resilience modeling

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a methodology that generates and links high-resolution spatial data on households and housing units with heterogeneous characteristics (i.e., size, tenure status, occupied, and vacant) to residential buildings which in turn are linked to critical infrastructure. The methodology utilizes areal demographic data from the US Census, which are probabilistically linked to an inventory of housing units located in residential buildings. By allocating high-resolution household socio-demographic data to housing units in single and multi-family residential structures themselves linked to critical infrastructure systems, coupled engineering-social science modeling is possible. This paper presents a workflow for linking social science and engineering data to enable integrated models for community resilience. The methodology is applied to Seaside, Oregon, a coastal community with a year-round population of over 6,000 persons. The application highlights the benefits of integrating social science and engineering data. Benefits include facilitating coupled modeling, accounting for uncertainty, visualization, and spatial exploration of modeled results.

KEYWORDS:

• Social systems
• synthetic population
• physical infrastructure
• social vulnerability
• community resilience

Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning, a NIST-funded Center of Excellence [Grant Number 70NANB15H044]. The authors thank colleagues from the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning who provided insight and valuable expertise that greatly assisted the research in particular Profs. Dan Cox and Andre Barbosa for information on the seismic model of Seaside, Oregon. The authors also acknowledge Prof. James Rosenheim at Texas A&M University for helpful discussions and suggestions. References to any specific commercial products do not imply the authors’ endorsement.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology [70NANB15H044].

Notes on contributors

Nathanael Rosenheim

Nathanael Rosenheim is a research scientist at the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University (TAMU) and the Director of Research for the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at TAMU. His research interests include data science; reproducible workflows; interdisciplinary research; and community resilience modeling. He holds a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Sciences from TAMU.

Roberto Guidotti

Roberto Guidotti is a Catastrophe Risk Research Analyst at Guy Carpenter & Company, LLC, focusing on parametric risk transfer. His research interests encompass risk, reliability, and resilience of interdependent urban infrastructure subject to extreme loading events, and earthquake engineering and seismology. He holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Ph.D. in Structural, Seismic, and Geotechnical Engineering from the Milan Technical University (Politecnico di Milano), Italy.

Paolo Gardoni

Paolo Gardoni is a professor and excellence faculty scholar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is the director of the MAE Center which focuses on the creating of a Multi-hazard Approach to Engineering, and the associate director of the NIST-funded Center of Excellence for Risk-based Community Resilience Planning. Gardoni is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure. He is internationally recognized for his work on sustainable and resilient infrastructure; reliability, risk and life cycle analysis; decision-making under uncertainty; earthquake engineering; performance assessment of deteriorating systems; ethical, social, and legal dimensions of risk; policies for natural hazard mitigation and disaster recovery; and engineering ethics.

Walter Gillis Peacock

Walter Gillis Peacock is professor of Urban Planning in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University (TAMU). He holds Sandy and Bryan Mitchell Master Builder Endowed Chair and is a Senior Fellow in the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at TAMU. He is currently serving as Program Director for the Humans, Disasters and the Built Environment and the Civil Infrastructure Systems programs in the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation, Engineering Directorate, at the National Science Foundation. His research areas include disaster recovery with a focus on housing recovery, community disaster resilience, hazard mitigation and adaptation, social vulnerability, and hurricane evacuation.

Walter Gillis Peacock Additional Attribution: ^d Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation, Engineering Directorate, National Science Foundation, Alexandria, VA, USA.